Producing food from CO2 using microorganisms: Lots to do, little to lose!

Background

For the first time, the recently held United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28) involved a summit leaders’ declaration to include global food production in their action plan to fight climate change. Reducing meat consumption is the primary way to take this fight seriously, nevertheless the global supply of people with high-quality protein is one of the central challenges of the coming decades. Producing microbial protein from CO₂ (aka single cell protein, SCP) offers the unique opportunity to recycle both, CO₂ from the atmosphere and food side streams, into consumer-oriented foods - an innovative path to a zero-carbon footprint diet.

Scope and approach

The importance of utilizing CO₂ as a substrate for microbial food production is underscored by comparative environmental footprint studies of various protein sources. This commentary systematically discusses the opportunities and technical challenges in realizing this vision.

Key findings and conclusions

The herein proposed acetate-based CO₂-to-food framework carries the potential to decrease the environmental footprint of food production by several orders of magnitude in terms of greenhouse gas emission, water, and land usage. While all relevant process steps are already advanced to a high technological readiness level, the key engineering challenges encompass their consolidation to a circular process, scale-up and product formulation.